Warbler Workshop
Beaver Lake Bird Sanctuary and
Blue Ridge, Asheville, NC
Tuesday, May 6, 2008

It was a beautiful cool spring day in the Southern Appalachians - and Beaver Lake was just hopping this morning. There's nothing quite like being in the right place at the right time- Cape May and Blackpoll Warblers were moving through, Yellow Warblers were just about everywhere competing with American Redstarts for attention. Yes, this was a "Warbler Workshop", but it's hard to ignore the other birds that were around the sanctuary. One of the newly-arrived Green Herons was already sitting on eggs and several shorebirds were feeding on the rapidly diminishing mudflats in front of the overlooks. The Semipalmated Plover count was up one to three, while the more regularly occurring freshwater shorebirds were present in decent numbers. It was then on up to Craven Gap and the Blue Ridge Parkway before the day got any hotter. Thankfully the male Kentucky Warbler was singing from a song perch allowing most of the group to enjoy this somewhat difficult to see warbler. There were more Redstarts, Hoodeds and Black-and-whites seen while we were enjoying our lunch before we started moving north to find the other warblers along this stretch of the Parkway. Blackburnian Warblers eventually gave us pretty good views before we finished with some nice underbelly (what's new?) of a singing male Cerulean Warbler. We ended the day with 20 species of warbler seen or heard- not bad at all, and a very nice day overall.